European Trash Cinema was a pretty long running ‘zine put out by my neighbor Craig Ledbetter which focused on sleazy trashy action, horror, and erotica films (as well as other independent, low budget type films- westerns and even dramas and romances) from Europe (NO American films allowed).
It started off as a few photocopied pages, but by the time this issue came out, it was digest sized and professionally printed (it would later come out as comic book sized and in color).
It differed from other underground ‘zines in that it featured a lot of different reviewers and writers (instead of one or two people doing it all- this issue even included a review by Steve Bissette), and was mostly just reviews at this point (plus they’d feature an underground European director’s discography each issue- remember that at this time, there was no internet or internet movie database- we counted on resources like this to inform us on hard to find foreign directors and movies (lots of which were released under different names and pseudonyms) ), but they started doing bigger features and interviews later.

This issue was very Joe D’Amato (who editor Ledbetter calls a “hack”) centric (including several Emanuelle reviews and a filmography).

I planned on putting this up last week for a remembrance of Jess Franco’s death (yes I know Jess wasn’t featured in this issue, but he was covered in several issues of ETC, and is the exact example of the type of filmmaker they focused on), but for varuous reasons didn’t, so here it is now: